Allan Stein
Encyclopedia
Allan Stein is a 1999 novel by Matthew Stadler
Matthew Stadler
Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor who lives in Portland, Oregon. He has written four novels and received several awards and fellowships in recognition of his work. More recently, he has compiled four anthologies about literature, city life and public life...

. Its epigraph is a quotation from writer Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

: "What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?"

The novel won the Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the award...

 for Gay Men's Fiction and the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Plot

In the novel's first section, the protagonist loses his teaching job due to a false accusation of seducing a 10th-grade student. He then seduces the student, and having done so, departs on a trip to France. In France he assumes the name of a friend, 'Herbert', and pretends to be a curator looking for lost drawings of Allan Stein.

The protagonist uses his new identity to become close to the son of his hosts, a moody 15-year-old named Stéphane. The narrator projects
Psychological projection
Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people...

 onto Stéphane an idealized memory of his own childhood, when he visited France with his mother at age 16. Enchanted by Stéphane's mother as well as her son.

After two weeks, the narrator succeeds in making Stéphane his lover, and the two run off together to the South of France. But Stéphane returns to his parents when he discovers that the narrator has lied about his name. It is only at this point that the reader discovers the real name of the narrator: Matthew.

Inspirations

Allan Stein was a real historical character: he was Gertrude Stein's nephew and the subject of a portrait by Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

 in 1906, when Allan was 11. On choosing this obscure figure as the subject of his book, Stadler has said, "Allan was a kid surrounded by powerful adults, and my work has always focused on kids living in the midst of adult projections."

In a 1999 interview, Stadler explained that this plot-turn offered him a way to look more closely at the relationship between an author and a fiction. He said that giving the fictional narrator his own first name left him "overwhelmed emotionally. I recognized that my inability to arrive at a right relation to these fantasies came from how nervous, hesitant, and defensive I felt about my presence as a writer of this. To have a character address me directly was very chastening."

This self-reckoning, he says, helped him conclude what had become a four-book inquiry. "I had been working for four books around this question, trying to achieve some kind of relation to the image of the boy. Allan Stein brought together so many strands of my work, I thought maybe I could neutron bomb
Neutron bomb
A neutron bomb or enhanced radiation weapon or weapon of reinforced radiation is a type of thermonuclear weapon designed specifically to release a large portion of its energy as energetic neutron radiation rather than explosive energy...

the whole boy-mythology construct by somehow exhausting the territory of my fantasy."

External links

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